A Moment to Reflect on 2019 // Goals for 2020
2020 is almost upon us. Last year around this time I stated: “This year has been pure 100% garbage.” Boy if only I had known what 2019 was gonna bring! Failed out of college, financially ruined, health is the worse its been in all of my existence. My goals were an interesting lot. I intended on getting my finances figured out. That… still hasn’t happened, surprisingly! Career wise I wanted to “strive to learn more, and not fall into bad habits.” It’s been a process; I think work cutting hours back from 72 to 65 has in some ways helped. I still had some moments in 2019 I wasn’t proud…
JK Haru is to Isekai What The Iron Dream is to Science Fiction
In 1972, Norman Spinrad wrote a piece of work titled The Iron Dream. The concept, on its face, was simple enough: “What if Hitler, instead of starting World War II, emigrated to the United States and became a science fiction author?” The story in practice, however, was far different: in embracing certain tropes common with Nazi ideology, it crafted a a story-within-a-story titled Lord of the Swastika that showed the reader how much of the popular science fiction of its day was incredibly problematic. Taken out of the context of its ideology, it could easily be compared to almost any other science fiction work of its time (and indeed even…
Haiku 001
How much can I fit In the haiku prose format Oh no out of space
The Horrifying Truth Behind Jamie Hawke
I’m sure many of you are familiar with author Jamie Hawke – he’s an indie author who is adept at crocheting light science fiction stories with unique superhero characters and racy erotic content via his Supers: Ex franchise. He’s also got some clout for his portal world Rift Wars series, in which a science experiment goes wrong turns a video game meant to help the living come to terms with the deceased opens up gateways to other words and dimensions. But not a lot of people know the truth behind this dynamic author – that it’s he’s actually capable of writing good stories that don’t have sex in them, but…
Anime Discussion: Doreiku
Last year, an anime show titled Dorei-ku: Boku to 23-nin no Dorei aired on Japanese television; the streaming rights were later acquired by Sentai Films and as a result it can be watched on VRV in English. This show is a thing. I’d like to read the novel it’s based off of, since I imagine it’s not restrained by the 12 episode format of this show, but alas it’s not in English. There’s apparently also a comic, that has a solid fan translation, but I can’t be bothered, so here we are! At any rate, I can’t really recommend this show. But unlike a lot of other viewers, I really…
Review: Dark Magician as a Hero
Sol Press USA, under its “Panty Press” publishing line, announced what it claimed to be the first “h-novel” to ever have an official English release: “Busy Wizard: This Warlock Just Wants to Provide for his Wives!” The voracity of this novel being the first of its kind stateside is debatable, but the fact remains that a light novel with adult content being properly translated into English and given a wide distribution is almost unheard of. A fantasy adventure harem story seems like a solid place to test the waters, and the author’s rising popularity with the source material means there’s a lot to work with and translate. It helps that,…
Some Yuri You Might Enjoy
Continuing in my attempt to expand this blog and what I use it for, I was in a discussion with some people and one of them said they were into something called “Yuri.” I wasn’t familiar with it, so I did a quick Google search, and man have I been missing out! Turns out there’s all sorts of Yuri out there. I thought it would be neat to put together a few of them that caught my eye, so that’s what we’re posting about today. So without further hesitation, let’s dive right in! Red Alert 2’s Юрий In the Command and Conquer franchise, Yuri (played by Udo Kier) was an…
My Ramblings About Various Ships
In a post late November, user (god I hate his name) LiteraryFuckBoi posted his opinion piece “Rambling About Various Ships.” It got me thinking, you know, I’m an individual who has some ships he likes, maybe I should share them? So in this post, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. He talks about ships he enjoys and ships he finds questionable, and I think that’s a great place to start. So without further ado, and without any particular order, here’s a list of some ships. Eve Online: Catalyst The Catalyst is an amazing Destroyer-class ship that’s cheap enough a pilot can afford to lose a few, strong enough to…
6 Blogs & 1 Podcast You Should Follow If You Enjoy My Content
As I continue to grow this blog, it’s clear that it wants to focus on the stories I read and the authors I interact with, which is interesting because it was never originally intended to be just about writing. Sure, I wanted to share some of the stuff I wrote, but that would require that I actually write and publish work and we all know how difficult actually doing things is! This blog was also supposed to be a place to share my opinions on the various media I consumed and, in rare instances, keep people up to date with what’s going on in my life. Like Facebook, only without…
Review: Six Sacred Swords
I don’t feel it’s fair to consider Andrew Rowe an Indie Author; after all, he has a remarkable number of credits to his name between work with Blizzard Entertainment and the highly acclaimed Shades of Venaya LARP. And yet, until a few months ago, I had never personally read any of his work or listened to any of the audiobooks reading from them. This all changed when it was recommended I read Six Sacred Swords, a novel set in Mr. Rowe’s world of Venaya. This particular novel is actually a bit of a side story that takes place between two as-yet unfinished trilogies the author continues to work on. It…